passivate

It seems like there are ways to solve the commuting problem, by moving closer to work for example, in much the same way as you say others should find a job to satisfy their in-person work requirements. But opinions aside, what is true is that remote work is not common in the vast majority of workplaces around the world - and isn't a viable option for a number of of jobs. Saying "People work differently" doesn't change that reality.

I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural? We killed micro-ecologies from vast areas of land, removed wild plants/rodents and other so-called "pests" and forced large scale growing of plants in various ways - selective breeding and process optimization to boost yields, etc. Do we call all that natural and draw the line at GMO?

So far he has lost a ton of cash on lawyer fees, M&A costs, etc. And EPIC now has to individually manage the acquired companies, make sure they're not competing against each other in the same market, etc, etc. I don't think this type of "spending current money to save future money" works. I don't care which company is doing it, but someone needs to break the App Store toll-booth.

Apple/Google/Anyone else trying to limit general purpose computing on mobile/PC platforms is a terrible thing for computing, but thats just my view. The ideal situation is we have a default app store - where the system integrator enforces all their policies, but then a user can voluntarily choose to download a separate app store where that store is run by different less exploitative policies. To make it easy for users, you can have an central store-front which then re-directs users to the different store pages. No different than a "Nike store" on Amazon.

Sure, but you can say that about a lot of things. Students who have the means to pay for tutors have a higher chance of success at admissions. Athletes with access to expensive training programs/equipment/supplements/time-off to train versus poor people who need two jobs to survive. Like I said, the world is fundamentally unfair. What policy proposals do you think would help reduce the divide?

That's harsh. I don't think people should be taken to task for for taking advantage of the "privilege" they were born in. Why wouldn't you take advantage of college (and thus a decent well paying job) when someone born in poverty in a low-income country can barely make ends meet? Why wouldn't you take advantage of access to a mainframe when you were a kid because your dad worked for the university?

Successful non-CEO people also benefit from luck and other factors. The world is fundamentally unfair. I don't think anyone owes anyone anything, but its my personal philosophy that its up to me to make sure I'm given a fair shake by others - to the extent that I can influence things.

My guess is Google would fire their own employees if they started making a list of co-workers habits/interests.

The open-source (also high-profile) nature of the project probably helps Google themselves keep their own team in check with outside accountability.

Maybe there is room between the two extremes?

For a new company, product features tend to overlap current or future needs of the users. If they didn't think of other people, they would probably not be billionaires. I suppose once you're a large company you can influence users in a way, but not really in a mass mind-control sort of way.

>What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start.

The companies don't want the kind of competition you're proposing though. All these companies spend massive amounts of money in loss-leading markets just so they become the ubiquitous platform of choice in all markets. Also, given that we don't have a world-government - what exactly are you proposing?

I don't know if you know this - all rights are made up. To the extent that we can convince others to adopt/agree to them, they can be considered universal, but otherwise they don't mean anything. It remains to be shown, but I would imagine plenty of people would be on-board with having the right to inspect inner workings of things they purchase - including firmware/software as most products have become heavily or completely reliant on software. I think there is a role for commercial proprietary software in our society and so I don't agree with the mission of FSF, but I respect anyone willing to fight for their beliefs.

It completely depends on how you approach the term idealism, and what your consider ethical. You're framing the argument as-if goals should be above ones ideals. If you can't convince people about the importance of free-software then the project should die off. I don't see the value in diluting the mission.

Someone who thinks eating sick animals (most meat products) is unethical, isn't going to compromise their personal values just because you're treating them to a meal at the local steakhouse.

By that same logic the US should immediately stop giving foreign aid to developing countries or investing in other programs since we still have homeless people here. The reasons why entities spend money on specific things is not a univariate. Also, there is a whole meta discussion to be had about what sparks creativity and innovation, I have a pet theory about over abundance of resources creating stagnation and dulling people's motivation and creativity. Beyond a certain point, throwing money at a problem can be counter productive.

At the end of the day, results matter and SpaceX has shown results.

>The common portrayal (at least in the US) is that unions are evil.

>That's why American unions and union activity have been almost completely squashed in the US for decades now.

But the public favourability hasn't declined (at-least as per this poll)

https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-ste...

>You could just as easily define 'right' as everyone intervening anywhere, regardless of borders, to prevent mass civilian casualties. One obvious case comes to mind.

The US hasn't intervened when it comes to mass civilian casualties in Pakistan, Kashmir, North Korea, etc, etc, etc. The US is hypocritical (like many countries) and intervenes when it is convenient.

On a related note - do you support Putin's invasion out of "concern" for the people of Donetsk?

Why do you think you can pressure me into accepting your opinions? I don't want to argue with you so how about this - you do it your way and I'll do it my way. But, thanks for your concern.

Your analogy is flawed. The CPU doesn't care at all about how or what code looks like, all the nice comments explaining what it does, nice naming conventions, whether its easy to understand or not. They have zero impact on the final compiled code. The executable ends up as a spaghetti of machine instructions with countless gotos in a single large file.

Using bad ingredients in food, or poor quality materials in construction has tremendous impact on the final product.

>"Better is the enemy of the worse" is no excuse to have spaghetti code, or 50,000 lines of code files. It means that good is sometimes more convenient than perfect. Spaghetti code is not good to begin with.

Just calling code good or bad doesn't mean much - ultimately, results matter - if your code doesn't have tons of bugs, if your team can add features without any problems, if you can ship reasonably on time, if your product delivers value to the end user, etc - then you have succeeded. It doesn't matter what outsiders think about the code or what labels people give. Its best to ignore them and continue doing good work.

I don't have a hot-line to any executive branch of government, so I am going off of historical actions presided over by elected representatives of both left/right.

>But it does mean opposing fascism and racism, and sometimes fighting against them.

Indeed, the US should oppose those things inside their own boundaries where they have the right to. There is no reason to assume the US is virtuous and right on any given moral issue. In fact there are lots of reasons pointing towards the opposite case. We (I) don't want the US to invade other countries with its "concern" and cause mass civilian casualties.

When people complain about hiring practices, often, but not always, the concern is a false negative - missing out on hiring a talented and qualified candidate.

Ultimately, if the point is "you guys are doing it wrong", they're going to look back at their financial success, shrug and say "seem to work for us". They have had problems with treatment of employees and other issues, but I'm assuming we're talking about hiring in the context of people being hired to do a job that financially benefits the company. Just my $.02

To be accurate, the parent talked about 'support' for war - which is true. The elected representatives of the left have doubled-down on wars, expanded them and presided over mass civilian casualties.

Everyone has a very narrow range of specialized knowledge, opinions and beliefs, and people overvalue their own approach as nuanced and balanced and see-all-sides. Even on HN, there are several times when conversations on economics, pubic policy, science, vaccines border on cringey for someone who is an expert in those fields.

I think the single most hardest thing to do is to escape ones own perspective.

Your #3 point is great, I hadn't thought about it this way!

How does it encapsulate that? Can you explain? I see a story about a criminal.

How many developers that you know have been fired for introducing security bugs?

>someone with sufficient interest can exploit this

Sure, but that applies to any technology on any platform at any time.

I don't think your argument is all that strong. Memory bugs are not equivalent to vulnerabilities. To get to a security vulnerability you first need a logic bug that makes incorrect assumptions about the program state, the hardware, the API, the input, or something else.

Also, what is so bad about crashing bugs? To me, as a programmer, they're very good news. It means you found a bug, you (hopefully) have a crash/log to analyze, and more importantly it means the program didn't just silently continue executing and corrupt state/data without anyone knowing.

If these colleges don't value what you bring, why apply to those colleges? For many areas of study, we have amazing and relatively inexpensive access to instruction/training/knowledge - if that is one's goal. If ones goal is simply to get trained for a job/industry - then colleges are probably not a good fit either.

For one, they don't all have 11 aircraft carriers and 62 destroyers backing their money as the reserve currency in the world. For another, China certainly is.

Are you able to go back to a regular diet or is this more about managing diabetes and keep doing it long term?

I don't disagree with your general view, but all aspects of human biology have a certain level of uncertainty associated with them. Nobody expects guarantees with medications, surgical procedures, treatments for illnesses etc. Being skeptical is valuable against dogmatism, but we're not asserting things with absolute certainty here. We do have to recognize the difference and respect the outcome of the scientific process - which is what produced these vaccines. If you say the majority of scientists can be wrong, you have to be more specific. Do you mean colloquially wrong as in making an error in day to day work, or do you mean being collectively wrong about immunology since 1798 and we should reject things that we built on those discoveries?

If there is any risk here, I'd say the risk here is our own inability in not being able to describe human biology in detail. The vague statement "the human body can heal itself" sounds warm and fuzzy, and most people agree with it, but when transformed into "injecting these set of molecules into your blood will trigger complex interactions with independent internal biological processes and cause the body to produce clones of proteins with increasing avidity towards the original molecules which also trigger further complex biological processes [...]" - can get you into trouble sometimes if you treat it as absolute truth.